


to the other side

by hellalujah



Category: Electronic Dance Music RPF
Genre: Death, Drabble, M/M, Non-Graphic Violence, Reapers, Suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-02
Updated: 2017-04-02
Packaged: 2018-10-13 22:34:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,550
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10523292
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hellalujah/pseuds/hellalujah
Summary: Porter was meant to die many times. Hugo isn't letting that happen.





	

**Author's Note:**

> inspired by the other k's reaper hugo design
> 
> short and dark
> 
> soundtrack: [trentemøller - sycamore feeling (marie fisker version)](https://trentemoller.bandcamp.com/track/sycamore-feeling-marie-fisker-version)

The boy is nothing more than that when Hugo sees him first - just a boy, small and round-cheeked, making mud pies in his backyard.

There’s nothing particularly special about him and Hugo's taken plenty of children away before. It's not supposed to be any different from any other soul, not really. They're smaller, they shine brighter. More fiercely.

He doesn't like taking children. But he does it anyway.

The child is three years old, humming cheerfully to himself and rubbing his chubby fist absently against his chin. It leaves streaks of dirt across his skin but he doesn’t seem to notice.

There's a snake weaving its way through the grass. Striped yellow and red, deadly venomous. The child hasn’t noticed that either.

“Porter!”

The boy lifts his head at the sound of his name being called. His grandparents are visiting, Hugo knows. 

The snake is close now.

“Hello, sweetheart, come give grammy a hug-,”

The woman is old. Hugo examines her and she hasn’t got long left now; a lung disease that will choke the breath out of her for weeks until she finally suffocates to death, slow and painful.

He looks back at the snake.

A mercy.

His scythe falls, impulsive and final and the woman drops to her knees in front of the child. She yelps. The snake slithers away.

“Grammy?”

Her soul slips easy from her body and before she becomes formless she smiles at Hugo like she knows.

“ _Grammy!_ ”

The child is screaming. Hugo wraps an arm around the wisp of light that used to be a human being.

A soul’s a soul, he reasons. His quota is met.

\--

Porter is surprisingly - or perhaps unsurprisingly - accident prone.

He's already had a concussion and broken six bones by the time he turns eighteen, and he's not exactly a _daredevil_. Just… prone to injury.

Hugo watches more than is necessary.

He’s only called back twice. Once, when Porter’s family gets into a car accident - a fender bender but Porter’s seat-belt was meant to catch him around the neck. Crush his windpipe. He’s only fourteen.

The man in the other car is elderly, in his seventies and Hugo doesn’t even think about it before his scythe is turned on him instead of Porter. A soul is a soul.

And then Porter breaks his arm when he's seventeen and he was meant to die then too, some freak accident during a storm when a tree comes crashing through his biology class window.

A classmate dies instead. Porter's survival is a miracle, everyone says so.

The classmate wasn't meant to die for another twelve years - drug overdose after years of addiction. Hugo thinks of this as a mercy as well.

He justifies it to himself that way.

A soul’s a soul.

\--

When Porter is twenty he's been dating another boy for over a year and Hugo is still watching.

The boy, Mat, is twenty-two years old and he was meant to live a long life. All the way to eighty-six, a peaceful, sleeping death surrounded by family and friends.

He's hit by a car instead, crossing the street with Porter.

Hugo doesn't have any real way of justifying this one, but Mat's soul slips easily from his body with no regrets knowing that Porter survived.

“So that's the one, huh?”

Hugo flinches and nearly fumbles Mat’s soul. When he turns Dillon is hovering there, eyeing him. Another reaper and it's been years since they've encountered each other but they're friends. Or as much as any of them have _friends_.

“Pardon?”

Dillon snickers. “You haven't exactly been subtle. Everyone's figured it out by now.”

Hugo grips the soul in one hand tighter. Thumbs at his scythe with the other. He doesn't feel the need to answer.

Dillon breathes out something that could almost be a sigh. “Everyone dies eventually,” he says, slinging his scythe across his shoulders. Hugo ignores the mocking lilt to his words.

“I know,” he says absently.

A siren is blaring in the distance. There's already an ambulance on the scene, already a group of paramedics draping Mat's body in a sheet. Porter is kneeling, hunched on the sidewalk. Knuckles white where his fists are clenched against his thighs.

“Why him?” Dillon asks and he sounds almost genuinely curious.

Hugo's quiet for a beat that hangs in the air between them. He can feel Dillon watching and he makes himself turn his head to meet his gaze.

“Who knows?” he replies, shooting Dillon a grin that Dillon returns without hesitating.

“Not my problem, I guess,” he says cheerfully.

He stretches out and looks back down at where a paramedic is trying to talk to Porter, trying to make sure he's alright. He won't answer any of her questions, eyes wide and face pale with shock.

“He's cute though,” Dillon goes on and Hugo laughs.

“Yes.” He drums his fingers on the shaft of his scythe. “I suppose he is.”

\--

Porter is less cautious than he’s ever been after Mat dies.

Three times over the next year Hugo stops Porter’s death by causing another’s; a middle-aged man shoves Porter out of the way of a taxi and dies himself. An elderly woman - the same age as Porter’s grandmother had been, oddly enough - killed in a truly bizarre elevator accident.

A young girl, barely ten years old, crushed by falling rebar. If Hugo could feel anything like guilt, he would for that.

But Porter lives. Porter’s still alive and it’s all somehow worth it for that.

\--

“I'm tired,” Porter says into his hands. “I'm tired and I don't want this anymore.”

Hugo watches him quietly, scythe in hand. 

Porter's been sitting on his bathroom floor for the better part of an hour now, tub full, with a bottle of Xanax on the bath mat in front of him. The wine bottle on the tile to his right is more than half empty and Porter’s mouth is stained plum-red.

He hasn’t moved in a very long time. It startles Hugo when he reaches out to pick up the pills and turn them over in his hands.

“I can see you, you know,” Porter says suddenly, lifting his bloodshot gaze to where Hugo is floating.

Hugo stares.

“No,” he says eventually. “I didn't know.”

Porter quirks a sort of fragile half smile.

“I thought I was going crazy,” he mutters, looking back down at the pill bottle. “But you just - you just spoke to me.” He laughs, wet and bitter. “I guess that means you're really real. Or I'm just, fuck, extra crazy.”

Hugo drifts lower. Crosses his legs in midair so it’s almost like he’s sitting next to Porter.

“I'm real,” he tells him and he's breaking about a thousand rules right now but he can't bring himself to care.

Porter looks up at him again. The tendons in his wrist flex like he’s about to throw the pill bottle - away or at Hugo, Hugo’s not sure.

“Are you going to take me away this time?” Porter asks quietly.

Hugo doesn’t answer. He lays his scythe across his lap, careful, so careful with the blade.

Porter laughs.

“I wasn’t supposed to live this long,” he says, then drops the pill bottle to reach for the wine. “I know I wasn’t. Nothing feels right.”

Hugo doesn’t say anything.

“I don’t want to be here anymore,” Porter murmurs, taking a swig out of the bottle. “If I take all these pills you have to take me, right? You can’t, like, call an ambulance.”

Hugo hesitates for a long time before he nods, slow and careful.

“Good,” Porter says, standing abruptly. He sways in place for a moment and the tap drips once. The sound echoes off the walls.

And then Porter climbs into the tub, fully dressed. Feels around for the bottle of Xanax, pops it open and starts to swallow them down with gulps of wine.

“Good,” he repeats, when both bottles are empty. He closes his eyes and sighs.

Hugo watches.

\--

Porter’s soul is the most beautiful Hugo’s ever seen.

It’s corrupted, now. Condemned. Hugo’s never seen a soul that was, well, past due. But it shimmers and wobbles, a sort of hollow purple glow like a blacklight or a dying sun.

He holds the soul close to his chest, cradles it like a newborn and somehow it’s appropriate.

\--

“Is this what you wanted all along?”

Hugo lifts his head.

Porter’s hair is pushed back from his pale face. He’s washed out in the moonlight, dressed in all black. There are shadows under his eyes. A sadness tugging at the corners of his mouth.

But he’s as achingly beautiful now as he was in life.

“I don’t know,” Hugo says.

Porter looks at him and Hugo smiles. Porter doesn’t smile back. The wind picks up, catches Hugo’s coat and sends it billowing behind him. Porter’s gaze drags up and down his body once before he turns back to look at the city glittering below them.

“I should hate you,” Porter says quietly.

“Yes,” says Hugo.

“I don’t.”

“That’s good.”

The corner of Porter’s mouth quirks up so briefly that Hugo barely catches it.

“Show me what to do,” Porter says after a beat, hefting his scythe in one hand.

Hugo smiles. If he could feel anything like joy, he would, for this.


End file.
